What Else Does the Donald Trump–Russia Dossier Tell Us?

Growing up as an American in Russia means that I get asked a lot of questions about my upbringing: “Do Russians really drink that much vodka?” (Yes, if not more.) “Were there bears on the streets?” (None that I saw.) “Is it dangerous?” (Well, it depends.) I attended a Russian public school for most of my formative years, meaning I was immersed in the local language, society, and culture from a young age. But growing up an American in Russia also meant that I was an expat, an immigrant, a third-culture kid—the Other. Eventually, my parents moved me from Russian public school #1239 to the Anglo-American School of Moscow, an internationally facing school operated in tandem by the embassies of the United States, United Kingdom, and Canada.

On December 29, 2016, Barack Obama announced that he would be ramping up sanctions and kicking 35 Russian diplomats out of the United States in response to reports of Russian interference and meddling in the 2016 election. Historically, any diplomatic action or expulsion has warranted an equal and opposite tit-for-tat response. That same day, a high school friend sent me a CNN Breaking News tweet reporting that an unnamed U.S. official had told CNN that Putin planned on responding by shutting down the Anglo-American School of Moscow. My old school.

Then something unusual happened: The very next day, the Kremlin came forward saying that it had no such plans. Moreover, in one final act of defiance against Obama, Putin announced that he would hold off on any and all negotiations until then–President-elect Trump took office. The mortar shell was a dud. My classmates, friends, teachers, and I, it seemed, had fallen victim to the fake-news epidemic. My entire newsfeed was awash with posts bemoaning people's distrust and frustration with the mainstream media.

The Steele Dossier

Earlier that month on December 7, Russian President Vladimir Putin and his right-hand man, Igor Sechin, announced that they had successfully sold a 19.5 percent stake in Russia’s largest state-owned oil company, Sechin’s Rosneft, for a whopping 10.2 billion euros (or $11 billion). Sechin bragged that it was the largest privatization in global oil and gas in 2016.

One of Vladimir Putin’s closest deputies, Sechin is ostensibly an oil tsar whose salary has afforded him a tremendous amount of clout. He has a hostile relationship with the press and has sued multiple outlets for publishing stories about his lifestyle. In the past, Rosneft has held extensive business ties with ExxonMobil—the very same ExxonMobil that until recently was headed up by now Secretary of State (and recipient of Putin’s Order of Friendship) Rex Tillerson. Exxon and Rosneft had arranged for a $500 billion offshore-drilling venture as recently as 2012, but Obama’s 2014 sanctions during the Ukraine crisis clamped down on business dealings with Russia, effectively kneecapping the deal and costing Exxon $1 billion in the process. Needless to say, crude barons like Tillerson and Sechin both stand to do gangbusters, whether directly or indirectly, from the lifting of economic sanctions. (It should be noted that White House cybersecurity adviser Rudy Giuliani’s law firm, Bracewell & Giuliani LLP, also counts Rosneft among its clients.)

When BuzzFeed News published the Steele dossier in January, the media was naturally drawn to the salacious details (hotels! hookers! golden showers!), but beyond the juicy bits there were also stories of backroom meetings between powerful figures in Russian politics and business.
In the immediate aftermath, Trump dismissed the dossier as “crap” and outright refused to answer questions from outlets that published and retransmitted the dossier’s contents. Perhaps most telling, though, was Trump’s decision to repeatedly ignore and deflect questions about whether members of his campaign had made contact with Russian officials during the election—contact that has since been confirmed by intelligence officials and reported by The New York Times. U.S. investigators have since corroborated certain details, namely that, as CNN reports, “some of the conversations described in the dossier took place between the same individuals on the same days and from the same locations as detailed in the dossier."

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One such conversation is the reported July meeting between Sechin and then–Trump adviser Carter Page, as summed up in the dossier on October 18, 2016. According to the dossier, the Russian oil tsar allegedly offered the Trump administration a 19 percent stake in Rosneft, on the condition that Trump lift the aforementioned U.S. sanctions on Russia upon his taking office. Carter Page, a shade of a figure who was described by Russian energy officials as unremarkable, incompetent, and “a gray spot,” was granted a leave of absence from Trump’s campaign team in September, after the media kicked up a storm about his repeated visits to Russia. The Trump camp then disowned and distanced itself from Page; Sean Spicer even went so far as to say last month, “Carter Page is an individual who the president-elect does not know and was put on notice months ago by the campaign.”

But who ended up negotiating and buying a stake in Rosneft, which even the company described as a deal of "unprecedented complexity"?

I’d be remiss not to mention that Russian intelligence officials and diplomats have been dropping like flies since the kompromat file started making the rounds. Among them, FSB intelligence agent and cybersecurity expert Sergei Mikhailov was dragged out of a meeting with a bag over his head in December before he and another official were charged with treason in January. Meanwhile, Sechin’s reported “closest associate” and potential dossier informant, Oleg Yerovinkin, was found dead in the backseat of a car on December 26.

Growing up in Moscow, I remember walking along the Staryy Arbat with my parents, ogling the faces of the matryoshka dolls in souvenir-store windows. Nesting dolls are the perfect knickknack: a series of shrinking hollow figures painted and veneered to resemble celebrities, sports teams, political cabinets. My parents and their visiting friends would buy potato-headed caricatures of their favorite athletes and dictators to display on their mantels, where they would be left to gather dust.

Russian businessmen also use the term matryoshka to describe the complex shell companies used by oligarchs in order to pull off convoluted deals. For example, on paper, the Rosneft deal was brokered by a conglomerate of shell companies and financial institutions. This reportedly included several banks, namely Italy’s Intesa; the Qatar Investment Authority (QIA); and Glencore, a U.K.-Swiss trading house. But Glencore's 300-million euro contribution accounts for a relatively measly 3 percent of the total sale price, which earned the traders a .54 percent stake in Rosneft—think of that as a brokerage fee. That leaves a roughly 19 percent stake in the company—the same figure reportedly thrown around by Sechin in the Steele dossier and the same figure touted by Putin in his post-privatization public statements, which others have argued could be a coincidence.

Furthermore, a quarter of the funds (roughly 2.2 billion euros) is still left unaccounted for. The series of matryoshkas used to complete this deal is dizzying and includes a company based in the Cayman Islands, where local laws effectively prevent reporters from tracking down and revealing the identity of the owners. A company called QHG Cayman Ltd. was declared as a partner just nine days after the privatization deal was announced and just eleven days after QHG Holding, another nesting doll, was formed.

Other participants in the deal are also curious:

Trump supporters might recognize Glencore, the commodities company founded by the late Marc Rich. Rich was famously indicted for massive amounts of tax fraud, only to be pardoned by Bill Clinton in the waning hours of his presidency. Clinton’s controversial decision drew ire from both sides of the aisle, with many attributing the pardon to Rich’s wife's generous donations to the Democratic Party and to Clinton's library foundation, and a $100,000 donation to the Senate campaign of then–First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton. In addition to its canonical role in the Crooked Hillary narrative, Glencore also has an extensive track record of profiting off of geopolitical crises: Rich made away like a bandit during the Arab oil embargo, utilizing his extensive contacts in the Middle East to buy massive amounts of oil from Iran in the early 1970s.

On January 23, Silovik Sechin called for the Russian president to meet with representatives from Glencore, Intesa, and the QIA. Representatives from QHG Cayman Ltd. were curiously absent from the proceedings. On February 2, the Treasury Department modified Obama’s final sanctions on Russia to ease transactions between U.S. tech companies and the FSB, Russia’s security service and former employer of one Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin.

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Meanwhile, Trump’s political career has quickly devolved into a secondhand approximation of a presidency: His tweets are but increasingly desperate attempts at destabilization (“Was Obama too soft on Russia?!”), his transcripts rife with non sequiturs and non-answers. He has become a dangerous Technicolor parody of an American politician, a highly veneered, sloppily painted hollow shell.

If some of the dossier’s contents have been corroborated, then it’s worth looking into the specific claims made therein and expanding the investigation to include the Rosneft dealings. Could President Trump's refusal to release his tax returns contain the final matryoshka? It stands to reason that the contents could either prove or effectively disprove 45’s possible involvement and collusion with the Russian state. After all, if Trump’s tax returns list any of the banks in the consortium amongst his lenders, it might be a sign that he effectively traded American foreign policy for cold, hard cash. That’s grounds for treason. That's an impeachable offense.

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